I’m really curious if they can turn the investments into competitive process nodes. My understanding is that semiconductor technology has a very wide moat.
Export controls on simply redirect investment inward to domestic R&D and subsequent production capacity. Effectively, this is defunding US and US-controlled companies, who otherwise would have hoovered up Chinese money, fed into its own R&D and maintained the lead on Chinese companies.
The policy doesn't even succeed on its own terms. But no iteration, no reflection
> The policy doesn't even succeed on its own terms.
The policy doesn't succeed only if you limit your thinking on the chip industry and ignore the overall strategic context. Reducing China's access to latest & greatest is only the proximate reason for the export controls, with the overall strategic competition being the ultimate reason. It's simply a mean to an end.
As you said in your previous post, China would likely prefer to continue buying western chips, because being forced to develop their own will not improve their strategic posture, at least in the next years/decades.
Dependency on critical parts from external could be the only viable solution for smaller countries, but for countries like China is a intolerable risk to national security and has to be addressed at highest priority. The embargo just demonstrated how bad it could be, and it actually can be much worse in different contexts. So, obviously R&D is the only option left on the table. Cost is no longer a problem.